Hi

Is there a way to make grass come up through the spaces between paving stones without painting them in?

I tried to populate the ground with grass, but the grass comes right up though the paving stones themselves, not just the spaces between the stones.

These stones are just 4 cubes submerged into the ground leaving the tops there to look like square stepping stones with the ground visible in the gaps. The gaps is where I want the grass to populate

I applied the ecosystem only to the ground. I thought the grass would know to avoid coming up through another item.

thanks

There are several ways, maybe one will look good. I can think about these ones, from top of mind.

You could try to select "decay near foreign objects", with a small number (say, 1% or even less) but if the size of the stones is small (compared to the grass) that will not work properly. You might have to use the eraser in the eco-paint dialog, after populating, to delete some invading grass blades.

Another method could be to boolean subtract the 4 cubes from whatever you have as ground. In this way, there will be holes in the ground in the place of the cubes and so the grass won't populate there.

Yet another method is to create a bitmap to work as distribution map. In this bitmap, you would put black areas where the stones are and white everywhere else.
To create the distribution map, you could do a render from the top camera and use that as a basis for your design.

Hope one of these will help.

By the way, to your statement "I thought the grass would know to avoid coming up through another item.", don't forget that you're not really following the laws of physics in your scene. You're having your stones in the same physical space as the ground. That's impossible in the real world and so, of course grass will also not follow laws of physics either and will penetrate the stones. :-)

My method number 2 above simulates what would happen in real world: in the space where you have stones, you don't have ground.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2032368&user_id=572301&member&np

I tried 1: seems easiest, just have to zero in on decay setting.

I tried 2: after I populate with eco, could not seem to unboolean to replace or swap negative cubes for normal cubes keeping the same sizes and positions that can be textured. I had to cut (delete) cubes and then make new ones then resize and reposition them. not quite line up.

I'll try 3 in the future

maybe artrager will see this post and share how he did that grass between stones.

thanks for the help,

Wow :woot: artrager has some incredible stonework in his gallery. How he do that?

Mazak

The work from artrager is indeed great. I suspect that he did the stones and grass in 3ds Max.
You could PM him, perhaps.

Regarding alternative 2, I think you did some unnecessarily complex procedures. You don't need to swap the negative cubes. I would suggest these steps, I think these are the easiest and safest:

1. duplicate your cube-stones so that the copies are in the exact same place as the original ones
2. boolean subtract the copies from the ground
3. bake the result (to eliminate some stray pieces that sometimes remain)

The original stones are never touched.

Regarding alternative 1, what was the result?

not a hard thing to do with the grass/stones, but in order for it to look real and "stepped on"/traveled it should have to be done 2D"ish" i think. artrangers work is damn good, but not very realistic. Why oh why don't the admins do stuff like this for challenges :D

Find a good cobblestone texture bring it into Photoshop and greyscale it, where the actual stones are make them as white as possible invert it then use this map for your ecosystem distrabution.

Pardon my spelling, but Forum is not my first language LOL :D

Can't bake, I have Complete, not infinite :(

Quote -
Regarding alternative 1, what was the result?

Here's the result alternative 1.  This is not an attempt at art, it's just me learning how fill the spaces with grass.
There's a few straglers poking through the rock but I can just use the instance eraser after I populate or I can use a better decay number or just post work the evil blades outa there.
Yes OUTA is a word in my town. I hear it all the time, like as in hey you get OUTA here!

Quote - R.P.Studios said not a hard thing to do with the grass/stones, but in order for it to look real and "stepped on"/traveled it should have to be done 2D"ish" i think. artrangers work is damn good, but not very realistic.

I kinda like that illustrated look.

Quote -

Find a good cobblestone texture bring it into Photoshop and greyscale it, where the actual stones are make them as white as possible invert it then use this map for your ecosystem distrabution.

I've never yet tried a distribution map in vue, that could be fun.

I had a few minutes free yesterday and I started to work on something similar. This thread triggered me into it, so thank you! :-)

I realized there's a big difficulty: all available grass comes in clumps. The one you used is one of the smallest but still not small enough. I think to have a convincing effect, it's necessary to use individual grass blades, not clumps. I will model a few grass blades and try it that way.

I'm using a 4th approach. In Zbrush, I started with a plane and designed the cobble stones there with a mask. Extruded the unmasked areas and so I was left with a plane with some extruded areas, the stones. My plan is to use an ecosystem with an altitude restriction so that the grass blades only grow on the plane base, not on the stones.

Unfortunetaly, because of my real life activities, I will only have time for this on the next weekend. :-(

Rutra, take the Carex and give it, if necessary, a grass texture. I think some of the grass packages that are available have singular grass plants with them, Linda's (Lush) does have that, when I remember it right.

Yes it would be nice actually to have a solid growth single grass blade so that they can each be little different. Rather than a model that has a more  limited varience.

I can't find anyone that has just single Solid Growth Grass blade.  LInda's (lush) does have some clumps and even something called a curb hugging patch but it does not say if  that the patch is made of lots of single blade individual plants. Maybe it is maybe it is not. I don't own it and the sales copy does not really say.

If there is link to a definite single Solid Growth Grass blade. Let me know

I tried to edit the carex that came with vue 8 complete, but there was not way to dig into that parameter to reduce the amount of blades.

Thanks.

Well, this is maybe easier than you think. As a quick and not sooo dirty solution you can do the following.

Create a Carex plant in a scene and a grass patch - default or whatever you have. Then select the grass patch material and copy it, select the Carex and paste the copied material onto the carex. Then open the plant editor and change curlyness and flexibility to your needs and you have a single grass plant that you save from the plant editor as your own new species.

The other solution is - I double checked it now - Incredibly Lush Grassy Places that contains minimum two single grass blades and a weed. Or Incredibly Lush High Grasses that is made from single plants anyway. Both, as many other packages, available at Cornucopia3D.

Anyway, I made very quickly (just 30 minutes work) 9 different grass blades and an ecosystem. The material is not sophisticated at all, it's a solid green. So, it can be very much improved. I just wanted to test the concept and I was fairly satisfied, for now.

Maybe you check the Cornucopia3D description again. Look at the first image Linda shows on the Grassy Plants product page. It shows the different types of plants, at the bottom there are the three singular plants I tried to mention. But my method, as described above, should make personal plants quick too, so there are all options that are needed. Your method of course looks good too, The only thing that you have to be careful about is to make the plants not too small, otherwise you would need too many plants in an ecosystem.

Do you mean this? http://www.cornucopia3d.com/purchase.php?item_id=1970

Yes, they are singular plants but not singular blades. That's the problem.

To Wabe
What I want is a Solid growth plant  where whole plant is nothing more than  just one single individual blade.

To Rutra
looks like that modeling thing works ok to.

Well, refinements only over the weekend, I'm afraid that's all I have time for now.

If anyone's interested in this as it is, you can PM me your email address and I'll email the blade objects and the ecosystem.

I understood completely. I experienced a lot with all sorts of plants to create my moss plants. Coming from that I realized that a compromise is necessary. To avoid memory overflows and crashes because of too heavy and big ecosystems. Therefore I mentioned those simple plants that are close to a singular blade but reduce the raw number of plants in one ecosystem.

Cobblestone texture made in Filter Forge.  Used the bump map to create an alpha texture (selecting the colour range between the stones, filling the selection and backfilling in black)

Applied the cobble texture and bump to a flat plane, added ecosystem (used Carex as wabe suggested) and used the alpha I made as a distrubiution map.

As the meerkat says....' simple ' 

Nice stuff. That's one thing I like about Vue is that there multipul ways of doing things.

Hi all! Sorry for chiming in late. I am a hobbyist on a learning curve and yes, Vue is great for experimenting with multiple ways of doing things. The "decay near foreign objects" method works with trial and error but is not my favorite. In the "Stone Court" image I used the boolean method mentioned above (but in 3ds Max) to  create geometry in between but not under the stones. It is fun to paint the grass on with a large brush radius and watch it magically appear in the right places. I have yet to try the distribution map method (nice demonstration  gillbrooks). As for single blade Solid Growth plants, they would be very helpful. I will keep experimenting!

My EcoGrass has single grass blades but not solid growth.  Haven't tried it on this but I might

Thanks to all for taking time to help

Rutra
wabe
gillbrooks
artrager
R.P.Studios

That's all lot of good people helping out.

If I do something interesting with this info I'll be sure to post here.
a little short on art time right now.

Thank you for all the informative posts here in forum.
@artrager Thank you to post here in forum; and I hope we see you sometimes here again.

Mazak

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2043606

Per request of the Store, Cornucopia3d had asked me for some stone walkways for their Garden theme this month. In reading this thread, it made me conscious of the need to always include a "terrain mesh" to go along with such a product.

It turns out to be somewhat tricky to get a stable pierced terrain mesh for something like 70-plus irregularly shaped stones in a walkway, but it's worth the modelling effort. 

Quote -  So, thanks to all you good folk, I'll always remember to construct and include such a mesh in any kind of commercial walkway product I make in the future. (And, also, by way of thanks, I'll try to price these "dirt cheap" for the enjoyment of the Vue community.)

 
Love it !

Good looking stuff Pam, I would buy it :D

 ooo ... what plants did you use there, Forester?

Thanks. Please understand that I am not advertising here.

If we commercial model-builders are going to build something, we might as well make it as easy as possible on our customers. So, I was just trying to express "thanks" for the idea to add a pierced terrain mesh to stone walkways already scheduled to be built as a product for Vue.

Plants are the "material" portion of the "Grassland" Ecosystem that first shipped as a standard Ecosystem in Vue 6.  If you take a look at the "Grassland Ecosystem" in the Material Editor, you'll see that it is made up of two layered materials. (Actually 4 materials, but see explanation below.)

One is called "Wall - rocks ferme" and the other is itself called "Material", and this second one is made up of two layers of materials. (And one of these, also is made up of two more materials, for a total of four materials into this standard ecosystem.)

But, back to the answer for your question, if you will select just this second layer called "Material", you can save it out by itself as "my Plants" or whatever you like. It will automatically save into the Ecosystems Library.  Then you can apply it to anything you like. That is what I did here.  (One thing we commercial folk try to do is to use standard Vue materials as much as possible to illustrate our wares. Inventiveness and Improvment is the province of all you good artists.)

 :) Very nice.. hope that the vue 6 standard has been also incorporated into vue 8... we shall soon find out.  I think I have just about every one of your water packs, and I have spotted some others that I will pick up. 

Looking forward to playing with ecosystems.  I have been away far too long. 

Teque

Thank you! You are very kind!